Developed by a low-profile team and backed by Chinese investors and developers, Manus is currently available as an invitation-only web preview. A demonstration video on its website, manus.im, showcases its ability to create a custom website through a step-by-step process.

It is blowing people’s minds because it can do super complicated real-world jobs—like building custom websites, planning trips to Japan, analyzing Tesla’s stock, or even helping teachers design lessons. Unlike most AI chatbots that just talk, Manus actually does stuff by browsing the web, gathering info, and showing its work step-by-step.

Manus also claims to outperform OpenAI's Deep Research based on the GAIA benchmark, a third-party measure of general AI assistants.

As of right now, the economy isn't showing much sign of acceleration, and certainly not because of an army of AI agents. And whether it's truly a question of "when" — not "if," as he claims — remains a hotly debated subject.

There's a lot of money on the line, with tech companies including Microsoft and OpenAI pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into AI. Nadella's podcast appearance could be seen as a way for Microsoft to temper some sky-high expectations, calling for a more rational, real-world approach to measure success.

In a statement posted on his arch-nemesis Elon Musk's social network, Altman wrote circuitously around the previously slated launch of o3, the latest awkwardly-named version of its frontier reasoning model that's said to sometimes cost more than $1,000 worth of computing power per query.

"In both ChatGPT and our API, we will release GPT-5 as a system that integrates a lot of our technology, including o3," the CEO said. "We will no longer ship o3 as a standalone model."

With its claims of self-fact-checking, the launch of o1 last fall indeed got some splash. But it faded quickly — and when's the last time you heard about something actually exciting happening with it?

Fragmented sets of data about a population’s health, agriculture, infrastructure, procurement and borders should be unified into a single, secure database that can be accessed by AI models, Ellison said…Countries with rich population data sets, such as the UK and United Arab Emirates, could cut costs and improve public services, particularly health care, with this approach, Ellison said. How convenient, then, that Ellison happens to own a database company that is also currently attempting to scale up its AI business. Interesting how that works!

You may not like what Ellison has to say but, increasingly, it doesn’t seem like there’s much you can do about it. The new 'Old Donald' administration has made it known that it’s going all-in on the AI industry and that it wants to build out America’s AI businesses to make them the most dominant ones in the world. Ellison’s Oracle was recently announced as a member of the Stargate project, a new AI infrastructure effort that seeks to build AI data centers all across the U.S. Other participating members include OpenAI, Microsoft, SoftBank, NVIDIA, and other powerful tech companies.

The filings are related to the case Kadrey v. Meta Platforms — one of many such cases winding through the U.S. court system that’s pitted AI companies against authors and other intellectual property holders. For the most part, the defendants in these cases — AI companies — have claimed that training on copyrighted content is “fair use.” The plaintiffs — copyright holders — have vociferously disagreed.

Tere is reason to believe that Musk may soon pivot to prioritizing his AI ventures, where access to data is as important as computing power. Think about Tesla’s complicated position in China. Recently, its sales in the country were dramatically overtaken by BYD, a young and innovative Chinese EV maker. BYD saw a 41 percent increase in sales in China last year and sold more than five times more vehicles than Tesla there.

The rise of BYD and other fast-moving Chinese car manufacturers may be convincing Musk that the future of his immense fortune is less tied up in automobiles than in the control of data.

Musk’s role as Tesla’s CEO also points to numerous potential conflicts of interest. On Feb. 13, news outlets reported that a State Department contract to spend $400 million on armored EVs with Tesla was edited to omit any reference to the company after reports of the contract sparked backlash. There is also the question of Musk’s business in China, where much of Tesla’s manufacturing is based. This week, the company opened a massive $200 million battery factory in Shanghai.

The statement, signed by France, China and India among other countries, pledges an "open", "inclusive" and "ethical" approach to the technology's development.

Vance told world leaders that AI was "an opportunity that the 'Old Donald' administration will not squander" and said "pro-growth AI policies" should be prioritised over safety.

Altman says: "No Thanks". Musk says: 'Not interested in buying TikTok

The tech mogul is unlikely to win. But his goal may be more about making life difficult for the A.I. start-up and its leader, Sam Altman.

The blockbuster bid complicates things for OpenAI. The start-up is about to close a $40 billion fund-raising deal with SoftBank at a valuation of $300 billion. Altman also is trying to pull off a much-needed plan to convert the nonprofit OpenAI into a for-profit entity.

A question of the OpenAI board’s duties: Its directors don’t have any fiduciary responsibility to maximize returns, since it’s a charity. Board members include Bret Taylor, who sparred with Musk over his purchase of Twitter, and Larry Summers, the former Treasury secretary, whom Musk criticized just on Monday.

Meta Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun said in a post on LinkedIn that the impact of DeepSeek showed that “Open source models are surpassing proprietary ones.”

“DeepSeek has profited from open research and open source. … They came up with new ideas and built them on top of other people’s work,” LeCun wrote. “Because their work is published and open source, everyone can profit from it. That is the power of open research and open source.”

OpenAI’s Quiet Power Play: How Strategic Silence Countered DeepSeek’s Hype

Meta’s strategy was to distribute open-source AI mod

DeepSeek, TikTok, Temu: How China is taking the lead in tech

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Teens aren't buying Big Tech's promises on AI and online safety

Meta, Apple, and other major technology corporations are investing significant amounts of money to appeal to teens and young users. However, a study by Common Sense Media suggests that their efforts may ultimately be in vain, as a significant portion of US teens have little faith in Big Tech's approach and the role of AI.

The study explores the relationship between teens, Big Tech companies, and trust in technology, based on a survey of 1,045 teens aged 13 – 18.

Nearly half (47 percent) of surveyed teens also believe Big Tech will not make responsible decisions about AI and its implementation in their products. Additionally, 39 percent of US teens who have used generative AI for schoolwork reported encountering inaccuracies and misinformation, CSM noted.

Stop Worshiping the American Tech Giants

When Chinese artificial intelligence firm DeepSeek shocked Silicon Valley and Wall Street with its powerful new A.I. model, Marc Andreessen, the Silicon Valley investor, went so far as to describe it as “A.I.’s Sputnik moment.” Presumably, Mr. Andreessen wasn’t calling on the federal government to start a massive new program like NASA, which was our response to the Soviet Union’s Sputnik satellite launch; he wants the U.S. government to flood private industry with capital, to ensure that America remains technologically and economically dominant.

As an antitrust enforcer, I see a different metaphor. DeepSeek is the canary in the coal mine. It’s warning us that when there isn’t enough competition, our tech industry grows vulnerable to its Chinese rivals, threatening U.S. geopolitical power in the 21st century.

It should be no surprise that our big tech firms are at risk of being surpassed in A.I. innovation by foreign competitors. After companies like Google, Apple and Amazon helped transform the American economy in the 2000s, they maintained their dominance primarily through buying out rivals and building anticompetitive moats around their businesses.

Over the last decade, big tech chief executives have seemed more adept at reinventing themselves to suit the politics of the moment - resistance sympathizers, social justice warriors, MAGA enthusiasts - than on pioneering new pathbreaking innovations and breakthrough technologies.

Microsoft CFO urges employees to "focus" amid recent AI developments like OpenAI's $500 billion Stargate project — but CEO says DeepSeek is good for business

Interestingly, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella sees the emergence of DeepSeek's R1 AI model and other iterations as good for business amid Azure's slow growth rate. According to the executive: AI will be much more ubiquitous. And so, therefore, for a hyperscaler like us and a PC platform provider like us, this is all good news as far as I'm concerned."

Microsoft integrates DeepSeek’s AI model into Azure and GitHub (Owned by Microsoft).

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman: Company Considering ‘Different Open-Source Strategy’

The artificial intelligence (AI) developer had adopted that approach after starting as an open-source company, but is now rethinking it after DeepSeek’s release of a lower cost open-source AI model, Seeking Alpha reported Saturday (Feb. 1), citing OpenAI executives’ comments during a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” event held Friday (Jan. 31).

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said during the event that OpenAI needs to “figure out a different open-source strategy,” according to the report.

Do we need a supercomputer @ home

OpenAI Asking for Tens of Billions in New Investment to "Fund Its Money-Losing business Operations"

OpenAI announces surprise ‘Deep Research’ stream tonight(2/2)

The AI lie: how trillion-dollar hype is killing humanity

But here’s the uncomfortable truth: in the quest for AGI in high-stakes fields like medicine, law, veterinary advice, and financial planning, AI isn’t just “not there yet,” it may never get there.

These chips are at the center of a tense technological competition between the United States and China. As the U.S. government works to maintain the country’s lead in the global A.I. race, it is trying to limit the number of powerful chips, like those made by Silicon Valley firm Nvidia, that can be sold to China and other rivals.

And it was created on the cheap, challenging the prevailing idea that only the tech industry’s biggest companies — all of them based in the United States — could afford to make the most advanced A.I. systems. The Chinese engineers said they needed only about $6 million in raw computing power to build their new system. That is about 10 times less than the tech giant Meta spent building its latest A.I. technology.

“Microsoft Corp. and OpenAI are investigating whether data output from OpenAI’s technology was obtained in an unauthorized manner by a group linked to Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek, according to people familiar with the matter.” The story goes on to say that “Such activity could violate OpenAI’s terms of service or could indicate the group acted to remove OpenAI’s restrictions on how much data they could obtain, the people said.”

The venture capitalist and new 'Old Donald' administration member David Sacks, meanwhile, said that there is “substantial evidence” that DeepSeek “distilled the knowledge out of OpenAI’s models.”

Although China has boosted investment in advanced tech to diversify its economy, DeepSeek is not one of the big Chinese firms that have been developing AI models to rival US-made ChatGPT.

Experts say the US still has an advantage - it is home to some of the biggest chip companies - and that it's unclear yet exactly how DeepSeek built its model and how far it can go.

While many American companies are worried that A.I. technologies could accelerate the spread of disinformation or cause other serious harm, Chinese companies are more willing to release their technologies to consumers or even share the underlying software code with other businesses and software developers. This kind of sharing of computer code, called open source, allows others to more quickly build and distribute their own products using the same technologies.

The White House has instituted a trade embargo designed to prevent Chinese companies from using the most powerful versions of computer chips that are essential to building artificial intelligence. A group of lawmakers has introduced a bill that would make it easier for the White House to control the export of A.I. software built in the United States. Others are trying to limit the progress of open-source technologies that have helped fuel the rise of similar systems in China.

But Chinese tech companies face a major constraint on the development of their A.I. systems: compliance with Beijing's strict censorship regime, which extends to generative A.I. technologies.

“Our principle is not to lose money, nor to make huge profits … our starting point is not to take advantage of the opportunity to make a fortune, but to be at the forefront of technology and promote the development of the entire ecosystem.”

By 2021, he was reported to have bought 10,000 of the chips, seemingly for his personal hobby. Only a handful of large Chinese tech firms have similar reserves of Nvidia semiconductors. “Many people would think that there is an unknown business logic behind this, but in fact, it is mainly driven by curiosity,” Liang said in 2023.

Some analysts and investors have expressed scepticism about DeepSeek’s market-rattling claims.

But the team behind the system, called DeepSeek-V3, described an even bigger step. In a research paper explaining how they built the technology, DeepSeek’s engineers said they used only a fraction of the highly specialized computer chips that leading A.I. companies relied on to train their systems.

The stand-out feature is Gemini's new ability to chain actions together. This means you can now do things like connect to Google Maps to search for nearby restaurants, then draft a text in Google Messages to send to people you’d like to invite to lunch, all through Gemini commands.

Oracle, and Softbank OpenAI’s legal battle with Elon Musk reveals internal turmoil over avoiding AI ‘dictatorship’

“It’s clear he has abused the proximity to the president,” said the 'Old Donald' ally. “The problem is the president doesn’t have any leverage over him and Elon gives zero fucks.”

The “kill chain” refers to the military’s process of identifying, tracking, and eliminating threats, involving a complex system of sensors, platforms, and weapons. Generative AI is proving helpful during the planning and strategizing phases of the kill chain, according to Plumb.